


Stained

by Octinary



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Blaviken (The Witcher), Cynicism, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Mentions of Lambert's Past, Tough Love, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28725900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Octinary/pseuds/Octinary
Summary: Geralt returns to Kaer Morhen the winter after he earns the title Butcher of Blaviken.  While Eskel and Vesemir seem content to let him deal with it at his own pace and in his own time, Lambert has never been that nice.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Lambert
Comments: 35
Kudos: 104
Collections: The Witcher Flash Fic Challenge: Secret Santa (TWFFSS20)





	Stained

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ruffboi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruffboi/gifts).



> Secret Santa written for the prompt:  
> 
> 
> You said you were okay with angst, but wanted a happy ending. Umm... will you accept a happier than when it started ending?

The story beat Geralt home. It came up the mountain in snippets on scraps of paper carried by pigeons from the many and varied illustrious figures Vesemir maintained a professional correspondence with. It came up the mountain as a rumour gnawing at the back of Eskel’s mind, heard once or twice, surely no more than three times, but which he stubbornly tried to dismiss as fantasy since the character in it was utterly unrecognizable from the man he knew. It came up the mountain as thirty inflamed and angry red stripes on Lambert’s back.

On his journey back to Kaer Morhen, in Yspaden, where the anti-witcher sentiment had been boiled into a fever pitch by the summer’s earlier tragedy, he had been whipped for the crime of “attacking a citizen.” In actuality he had only been speaking harshly to a vendor who had outright refused to sell him a roast chicken despite him actually having the coin for once. He’d been surrounded by what passed for the local militia armed with crossbows while he was still thoroughly and colourfully cursing the whoreson’s ancestry and had submitted to the humiliation, and the punishment, in lieu of starting a fight. There were too many of them, the chance of taking a stray bolt somewhere vital was too high, and it wasn’t like it was the first time he’d ever been whipped. Plus his retaliation would have inevitably resulted in more humans dead by a witcher’s hand and there had been enough of that already this year thanks to his older brother, Geralt of Rivia, the newly christened Butcher of Blaviken.

Lambert could tell that Vesemir and Eskel could sense what had happened to him the moment he arrived: the scent of blood and pus, the hint of colour in his cheeks and stale sweat on his forehead. Battered, bleeding and broken, more desperate than usual to reach a safe haven, he hadn’t waited for his back to heal before pressing on, and the scourge marks had festered. Vesemir tutted his disapproval, but whether it was over the state of humanity for doing this to him or over the sorry state of Lambert’s training since he let someone do this to him was anyone’s guess. Lambert had half a mind to just confront the old bastard, but Eskel had cut that off quickly with an authoritative, but again somewhat ambiguous, “Later.” It could have just as easily been directed at Vesemir in an attempt to curb his lecture as at Lambert in an attempt to curb his anger. Either way, it worked. With a series of eyebrow wraggles on Vesemir’s part and scoffs on Lambert’s part, they wordlessly agreed to table whatever argument was brewing until after Lambert’s fever broke.

Eskel helped the injured witcher limp to his cot in the main hall, cut his crusted shirt off of him and cleaned the mess that had been made of his back while Vesemir prepared a poultice. The old man brought Lambert a generous shot of vodka when he brought Eskel the strong smelling wrap to apply, so Lambert magnanimously chose to forgive any earlier judgemental tutting. He fell into a deep healing sleep almost as soon as the alcohol hit his stomach and was unconscious for most of the next five days as his body fought off the well established infection, waking only briefly to meagrely assist Eskel or Vesemir with the process of shovelling soup or porridge into him and expelling the remnants thereof out of him. Other than the raging fever and haunting hallucinations of his past it caused, it was the best damn rest he’d had all year. Besides, it had been a while since he’d seen his dad. It was almost nostalgic.

Geralt, he found out after he awoke on the afternoon of the fifth day, had arrived in the middle of his convalescence. Given that the great White Wolf wasn’t similarly sprawled across any of the other cots in the main hall, Lambert figured he had wisely chosen not to stop at Yspaden on his way back and thus managed to avoid getting a taste of their unique brand of hospitality. He felt himself release a breath he hadn’t quite realized he’d been holding. A small part of him had been not unreasonably concerned that if they’d whipped him for nothing more than having a foul mouth, they’d have killed Geralt for the Butcher rumours. They were only humans, and Geralt could have probably cut his way through them as easily as he apparently had the crowd at Blaviken, but it never hurt to overestimate the capabilities of an enraged mob. After all, the only real difference between a pitchfork and a spear was their intent of use when they were created.

“So where is he?” Lambert was sitting on his cot as Eskel fiddled with carefully unravelling the bandages on his back. Potentially as a bribe to sit still and let his brother work, Vesemir had offered him a plate of bread and cheese before the process had started. He had accepted it eagerly (finally some solid fucking food), and was eating voraciously. He was always starving after his body had to do a serious piece of healing. He wasn’t so distracted by the food so as not to notice that none of Geralt’s gear was present with the rest of their stuff though.

Eskel stiffened behind him, but otherwise didn’t answer the question. Vesemir had retreated back to the trestle table they used for dining and taken up his mending. Both of them were singularly focused on their tasks as they played a ridiculous game of ‘not wanting to tell Lambert something he was obviously not going to like hearing’ chicken. So Lambert, between mouthfuls, finally prodded, “You throw him out for bringing dishonour on the noble profession of witchering? Leave him to stumble back down the mountain to the tender embrace of humanity alone, forevermore a school-less wanderer?”

His jab had the intended effect of causing Eskel to flinch and Vesemir to finally offer, with a carefully neutral tone of voice, “He’s in his room.”

“His room? Why?” Of course, they all had rooms. Hell, the keep had been intended to sleep well over a hundred men, teenagers, boys and babes at its prime; the last four Wolves could have had twenty rooms each if they wanted. They never used them as anything other than personal storage space though. Solitude was not what they limped back to Kaer Morhen for every winter. After the pogrom that decimated their population, the few remaining survivors had taken to sleeping on cots in the main hall while the bodies were cleared out and the damage to the castle assessed. No one had said anything of course, but it also helped since the only way any of them could get to sleep under the weight of all those ghosts was to the soft, soothing symphony of the others breathing. As the restoration work proceeded, anything valuable (common alchemy components, weapons, armour, books, etc.) also slowly made its way into the main hall and never seemed to make its way out despite the growing abundance of perfectly serviceable empty rooms. Nowadays, when Vesemir said he was going to the library it was a tossup between whether he meant the actual library on the third floor or the scattered shelves that housed his favourite books near the kitchen. Besides, it was easier to primarily heat only one shared room. It just made sense to stay together. Although if Geralt felt like being an overdramatic bitch and freezing alone, Lambert supposed that was his prerogative.

Vesemir did not answer Lambert’s direct question, but did add, “He hasn’t been down since he arrived. Since he saw what was done to you.”

Lambert couldn’t help but roll his eyes. Trust Vesemir to somehow make this his fault. Clearly he had intentionally been beaten to within an inch of his life, just to make Geralt’s life harder. He turned to Eskel as the other man finished removing the last of his bandages. “He say anything to you?” He could tell by the way Vesemir’s ears perked up at the question that the old man was interested in Eskel’s answer too. He’d apparently been too proud to ask if his golden boys had been passing notes back and forth underneath the door. “Y’know, about it?”

Eskel shook his head. “Not a word. At all. About it, or anything else. He just… went upstairs and locked the door.” The concern radiating off of the other man was palpable.

Lambert just grunted in response and pulled his shirt back on. The rough fabric was particularly scratchy against his new scars, but time would dull that. It always did. The three of them sat in stillness and silence for a long moment, Lambert and Eskel on the cot and Vesemir at the table, the mending dangling forgotten in his hands. No one seemed entirely sure what to say.

Vesemir finally broke and cleared his throat before beginning, “I’ve heard several different versions from different sources-”

“They’re saying he slaughtered a marketplace full of innocent people!” Eskel babbled, as if he had been holding back a torrent of emotion and Vesemir’s overture had been the last push that opened the floodgates. “In cold blood! Just- just cut them down without mercy, all because some maiden spurned his advances! They say he killed her last, taking his time about it, cutting her up as if he were butchering a pig!”

“Well that’s bullshit.” Eskel looked almost relieved to hear Lambert’s assessment of the rumour. Maybe, deep down, some part of the big man had been scared that Geralt had actually snapped. The version Lambert had heard was a little more realistic. “I heard he fucked up a contract and some villagers in the marketplace, including a young girl, died as a result. Then, when he had the gall to show up and demand payment for his fuck up, the alderman ordered him stoned. He killed the bastards who tried and took the money from their cold dead fingers.” It still didn’t sound like something Geralt would do, but it at least sounded like something a witcher might do. Maybe one of those crazy Cats.

“There was a girl. And people killed in the marketplace.” Vesemir added. “Those were the only two constants in all the retellings I heard. Any assessment of his motives seems to be mere speculation.”

“Any believable ones bouncing around your old man gossip circles?”

Vesemir did not answer, which was in itself answer enough. The uncomfortable silence descended on them again, like a pall.

“Well there has to be one,” Lambert insisted obstinately. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have locked himself in his room like an angsty teenager.”

Eskel was not fidgeting, he had had all the fidgeting beaten out of him as a witcher trainee, but Lambert could tell that every fibre in the man’s body was metaphorically vibrating in anxiety. “What if there isn’t. What if something’s wrong and- What if he actually- What if the rumours are true and he- What if he’s upstairs alone because he’s trying to protect us?”

“From?” Vesemir raised a brow quizzically.

“Himself.” Eskel’s voice was soft.

“Then he definitely didn’t do it,” Lambert insisted with more conviction than he’d ever felt about anything before in his life. “Monsters don’t feel guilt.”

Eskel nodded in response, but wouldn’t meet Lambert’s gaze and the barely contained tension in his form was not eased at all.

Lambert sighed. “Well he can’t stay up there all winter. Eventually he’ll have to come down.”

*

Because Geralt was a contrary bastard who would sooner die than prove Lambert correct, eight weeks later he had still not come down, or at least not when anyone else in the keep was awake. He wasn’t dead, they knew that for sure. For one thing, food was disappearing at a slow but noticeable rate that indicated he wasn’t starving himself to death, but wasn’t eating regularly either. For another, a surprising number of chores were magically getting completed over night: fully dressed deer were just appearing in the pantry, pots left to soak ‘til the morning were scoured by the sunrise, chopped wood was stacked neatly by the front entrance. They either had an infestation of the particularly helpful kind of house faerie or Geralt was attempting to do penance via laundry. Lastly, if you pressed your ear to his door you could hear him puttering about and, just barely, the slow, steady beat of his heart. Not that Lambert had done that, of course.

In the beginning, Eskel had gone up every afternoon, as soon as he was finished his morning chores and training, to talk at Geralt through the door until dinner. Then he had started going up for a few hours every other day. Then every third day. When they got to the point where Eskel hadn’t been up to moan at Geralt in a week, Lambert snapped. They had just come in from chopping firewood and before they’d even gotten their coats off, Eskel’s eyes had darted tellingly to the stairs and he had given a deep, depressing sigh that seemed to originate from the very bowels of the keep itself.

“Alright. I’m done.” Lambert held out his hand expectantly. “Give me the axe.”

“What?” Eskel’s eyes widened and he took a step back, not relinquishing his hold on it.

“I’m going to knock the door down and drag him out.”

“You can’t do that.”

“It’s a tough door, thick wood, but if worst comes to worst, I think between the two of us we could-”

“I mean you shouldn’t.” Eskel put the axe back in its place on the rack and pulled his gloves and coat off, hanging them neatly to dry by the hearth. “He doesn’t want to see us. He’s made that abundantly clear.”

“Then why the fuck did he even come back here?” Lambert threw his own winter kit angrily at Eskel, who, frustratingly, just shook it out and hung it neatly as well.

The older witcher’s lips were pursed into a tight line and his tone of voice indicated that he’d had this fight with himself many times already and was not going to have it with Lambert. “Because he knew that here would be safe, same as you did. He just needs some time and some space-”

“He needs a slap upside the head is what he needs.”

“Lambert!” Yellow eyes flashed dangerously in the firelight and Lambert knew Eskel had been pushed as far as he was willing to go on this. “We don’t know what happened! What he’s dealing with! So just leave off!” And with that Eskel turned to storm away.

“Because he won’t tell us,” Lambert muttered under his breath.

“What did you say?” Eskel swung back.

There was no way, with his enhanced hearing, that he hadn’t clearly heard what Lambert said so his question meant that he was giving Lambert a chance to back down and prevent a fight. Because it was Eskel, because anxiety was obviously eating him alive, because he looked like he hadn’t gotten more than twenty minutes of continuous sleep since he arrived in Kaer Morhen himself, and because it was the winter and he was right, this site of their harsh schooling and subsequent torturous mutation was the closest thing they had to a safe place now, Lambert rolled his eyes and muttered, “Nothing.”

By the time dinner was finished, Lambert had hatched another plan though. When the dishes were done and Vesemir put on a pot of water to boil for tea and Eskel curled up by the fire with a book, Lambert started dragging his cot towards the stairs.

“Where are you going with that?” Vesemir raised a brow, but didn’t make a move to stop him.

“Upstairs,” Lambert grunted around the unwieldy burden. “Outside Geralt’s room.”

“Lambert…” Eskel growled in a warning tone.

“Asshole doesn’t own the hallway. I can sleep where I want.”

“You’ll freeze your ass off, idiot,” Eskel muttered sullenly.

Recognizing that Eskel did have a point about the temperature, after depositing his cot outside Geralt's door, Lambert returned for the furs off Eskel’s cot as well.

“Hey!” Eskel fumbled out of the chair by the fire and grabbed the trailing end of Lambert’s bundle.

“Lambert,” Vesemir’s voice interrupted, tone indicating that despite the interposing decades he clearly remembered their teenage shenanigans. “Don’t take Eskel’s blankets.”

With a sharp tug, his brother tried to pull the pilfered blankets out of Lambert’s grasp, but he was stubbornly not letting go. It was immature, but this was the closest they had got to their typical roughhousing so far this winter and he was going to milk this small sense of silly normalcy for all it was worth. Eskel growled again and narrowed his eyes. “Give them back, jackass! I told you this was a stupid idea, but if you’re set on it you can just-”

“Take the brazier from the library instead.”

Both younger witchers stopped their tussle to turn to stare at their mentor. After a shocked second, Eskel took the opportunity to liberate his sleeping covers from Lambert’s insensate hands. Tossing them back onto his cot, he sat down on them to prevent any future theft and crossed his arms in a huff. “You’re not actually going to let him sleep in the hallway, are you?”

Vesemir just shrugged. “To quote your ever eloquent brother, ‘Asshole doesn’t own the hallway.’ I've alternatively tried commanding and cajoling. You've tried being understanding and compassionate. Let Lambert try...” he gestured vaguely to encompass the entirety of the youngest witcher’s features and flaws, "being Lambert. It can hardly hurt."

It wasn't the most enthusiastic endorsement he’d ever received, but Lambert would take it. And the brazier from the library. To be honest, it was a bit unusual to feel like he was being trusted with something, especially something Vesemir and Eskel hadn’t been able to handle. In another lifetime, that would have been a source of anxiety, an unbearable force pressuring him not to fuck up. Now, with what they had all grown into to each other over the years of it just being them against the world, if anything, it gave him more confidence. Geralt needed his priorities readjusted and he was uniquely equipped to do this. Vesemir could be stern, Eskel could be insistent, but they needed Lambert to be mean.

"Open the window at the end of the hall a crack so you don't suffocate yourself with the smoke!" Vesemir yelled after his retreating form, before he started feeling too full of himself.

*

Geralt, clearly able to sense Lambert camped out on the other side of his door, did not venture out that first night. Lambert was not terribly surprised. He knew Geralt could be almost as stubborn as he was. When Eskel poked his head into the hallway in the morning to ask if Lambert had frozen to death in the night or would he be down for breakfast, Lambert gave him the finger and asked Eskel to bring his meals up to him for however long it took. He was determined to keep his vigil until the White Wolf broke. Eskel, optimistically, brought up enough breakfast for two, but Geralt’s door stayed firmly closed even to the overwhelmingly tempting scent of bacon, eggs and fresh bread. After happily consuming both portions himself, Lambert shooed Eskel back to his own chores. When lying in wait for prey, it was easier to hunt alone. Lambert let his mind slip into a shallow meditative state, senses focussed solely the room just beyond his reach.

At first all he could pick up was his brother’s familiar heartbeat and soft snores. Given how he was trying to avoid them, it wouldn’t surprise him if the other man had gone fully nocturnal, so he settled in for a long day of waiting. Surprisingly, he didn’t have to wait that long. Around midmorning he heard the first activity from the room. Geralt stirred, left his bed, shuffled around the room a bit and… washed something? Lambert furrowed his brow, trying to pick up more, but after a few minutes of splashing Geralt returned to bed. An hour later, he was at it again though. And then twenty minutes after that. What the fuck could be in there that was that dirty? Eskel had mentioned hearing water during his rants at Geralt’s door as well. Lambert leaned closer and caught a faint whiff of lye and blood. In a flash, the whole scene snapped together in his mind like a deadbolt locking into place. There was only one answer as to what two things in that room Geralt would still feel were unclean after scrubbing them raw.

In his mind’s eye, he was nineteen again, freshly out of Kaer Morhen and distinctly feeling the flow of blood over his shaking hands from the first time he’d had cause to unsheath his steel sword. He remembered washing them in water cold enough to pink his skin so badly that he couldn’t tell if the colour was just the cold or if the accusation of the man’s blood had seeped into his pores to mark him as damned for the rest of his days. It hadn’t, of course, and the next morning his hands had regained their normal colouring, but it had been a long fucking night. And even now, some mornings, when his dreams had been particularly vivid, and he caught a glimpse of his hands in the right light…

But it wasn’t worth obsessing over. If humans didn’t need killing sometimes they wouldn’t have given him a steel sword. Or at least that’s what he keeps telling himself.

The washing continued periodically through the day. Every time he heard Geralt lay back down, Lambert would half-heartedly hope that that would be it and Geralt would be done, and every time his prayers would go unanswered. Which was par for the course really. Whatever old gods existed embedded in the cold rocks of the keep, they never turned a sympathetic ear to Lambert anyway. He would have to do something himself, like usual. After midnight, when he knew the other two were in bed, he waited until the next time he heard the tinkling splash of water in the basin and then finally spoke, clearly so as to carry through the heavy wood. “It won’t work.”

As quiet as he was already being, Lambert could still tell that Geralt froze on the other side of the door.

“Blood stains. You need something stronger to get it off. You’ve been trying it with just soap and water for weeks now and it hasn’t worked yet, right? This isn’t some bullshit ritual the priestesses have you doing to symbolically cleanse your soul or whatever. It’s not going to magically work the five hundredth time, when it didn’t work the four hundred and ninety nine times before.” He paused, baiting the hook. “I’ve got something in the alchemy lab that will do the trick.”

The more commonly used reagents lived in the main hall now, but Lambert still maintained a well stocked lab in one of the towers, far enough away from the main hall that when he inevitably blew himself to kingdom come the others would at least be spared. He didn’t forbid the others from using it, but they never seemed to have the inclination, so it was safe to assume Geralt had no idea what sort of chemical cleaners he might actually have prepared. He could hear shuffling on the other side of the door that indicated his fish was getting ready to bite.

“And I’m not even being an ass and talking about my moonshine.” He felt like he could hear Geralt thinking. “C’mon. Eskel and Vesemir are conked out. Just me and you. Won’t even ask you any questions. Promise. And I guarantee you won’t see any blood on your hands when we’re done.” He could tell Geralt had moved to just the other side of the door. He resisted the ridiculous urge to hold his breath. This is why he much preferred fishing with bombs. The traditional way requires far too much patience. “I swear on my father’s grave.”

“You hated your father.” Geralt’s voice sounded hoarse and weak, clearly unused.

“Yeah, well, that’s what makes it such a good oath. Fact that the bastard’s dead is just about the closest thing you can get to holy in my mind.”

The small sound of the lock finally clicking open was the sweetest thing Lambert had heard in months. The door swung open slowly, hinges clearly greased to facilitate Geralt’s previous nocturnal escapades, and the first thing Lambert clocked was that Geralt looked like shit. He was too skinny by far, and his cheeks were sunken and shallow. There were dark rings around his eyes, indicating he hadn’t slept well, which, given the compulsive hand washing, was not surprising. Also not surprising: his hands were an angry, raw red.

“Shit. You do know that all that red stuff on your hands right now is your own blood, right? I mean, it is generally safe to assume you’ve got all the residue off your skin once you’ve removed, y’know, the skin.” 

Geralt pushed past him towards the tower that housed the alchemy lab. “You said no questions.”

Conceding the point, they walked in silence to the room where Lambert got what little joy he could out of his enforced profession: improving on the potion, decoction, oil and bomb recipes of his similarly cursed forebears. When they entered, Lambert gestured to a barrel set off to the corner. “There.” He walked over and pulled the lid off. “Dunk ‘em in there.”

Geralt wrinkled his nose at the faintly metallic odour that wafted into the room when the container was uncapped and hesitated.

“What?” Lambert prodded, smiling cruelly. “You scared?”

Setting his jaw Geralt strode unhesitatingly forward and plunged both hands up to his elbows into the barrel. Lambert knew that, given the abraded skin on his hands, the solution would be milding irritating, but it wasn’t anything Geralt couldn’t handle. True to form, the White Wolf didn’t flinch and held his hands under for the space of a minute until Lambert said, “That should be enough.”

When he pulled them out, what little colour he had left in his face drained immediately and he looked as if he had been physically wounded. He made a soft noise, like a beaten child does when he’s kicked after he’s already been knocked to the ground and has given up trying to defend himself. Stumbling mutely, he backed away from the barrel, seemingly trying to back away from his own hands, which were now stained black everywhere the solution had touched.

“Silver nitrate,” Lambert explained. “Should be good now. Can’t see any blood. Won’t see anything but black.”

With an animalistic snarl, Geralt turned on Lambert and decked him hard, right in the nose. The punch was messy, unpracticed and Lambert could see it coming a mile away, but he let it land: hitting someone always made him feel better after all. Although, if he thought the poor form meant that it wouldn’t knock him off his feet he was dead wrong. Faint lights danced in his vision as he tried to pull himself off the floor. His other senses told him that Geralt, with a choked sob, was fleeing the lab.

“It’ll fade!” Lambert still couldn’t see straight, but he could see enough to know that Geralt had whirled back to him, still vacillating between despair and rage.

When Geralt spoke the words were clipped, spat out between obvious internal bouts of self-recrimination. “I know this is… payback for… for what happened to you in Yspaden. Which fine, you deserve some… some recompense from me for… for that, but-”

“Why the fuck would I blame you for what the cocksuckers in Yspaden did?” Lambert shook his head, finally clearing it, and grabbed the bottle of alcohol off the lab bench. Sure it was pure ethanol, but what were all those fancy mutations good for if not metabolizing poisons? He took a small swig and offered the bottle to Geralt, who stared blankly at him, but at least wasn’t running away anymore. “Humans are always looking for the flimsiest of excuses to put us in our place. If there weren’t rumours of you massacring villagers in Blaviken, it would have been some other witcher fucking something up somewhere else. And if not that maybe they had a shit harvest or the sun was too bright that morning or some wolves got into the sheep. Who knows. Or maybe I was my normal charming self and did absolutely deserve it.”

Geralt started at the suggestion. “Did you?”

Lambert met his gaze openly without flinching or blinking. “I attacked a citizen.”

“Damn it, Lambert!” Geralt’s swing to condescending prick was not entirely unexpected. It was a button Lambert had been pushing for decades after all. “You can’t just- you have to keep better control of your temper! They could have killed you for that! You have to be more careful otherwise-”

“Anyway,” Lambert cut off the lecture he did not want and certainly did not need. “You weren’t there. It had nothing to do with you. So if you’re going to drive yourself crazy with guilt, do it over something else. You don’t get to use me like that.”

Geralt’s lips pulled back into a sneer as he held up his stained hands. “So if it isn’t payback then this is just your idea of a sick joke? A fun little reminder to me of what I did? Gods, I knew you don’t care for most people but-” 

Lambert interrupted again. “Am I sad those people are dead and you're not? No. Not even a little bit. I've killed people too: because they fucking deserved it, or in order to stay alive, in order to come home. Does that make me a monster?” When the White Wolf didn’t respond, Lambert simply took another swig from the bottle and continued. “Would you rather I didn’t? Let them kill me?”

“No.” He dropped his hands and shook his head. “No.” There was a long moment where Lambert stayed leaning in affected casualness against the bench and Geralt stood in the doorway facing him, hands limp at his side and staring off into the distance as he wrestled with something. Finally, he sighed and moved to lean on the bench beside Lambert, accepting the bottle and taking a drink himself. “Honestly? I wish you’d killed the fuckers that whipped you before you let them do that, reasons be damned.”

Lambert smirked back. “So maybe we’re both monsters.”

Geralt passed the bottle back and stared at his hands. “Maybe we are.”

“It will fade.” Lambert insisted. “Everything fades: silver nitrate, ink, henna, the blue woad stuff the Skelligans use, even scars and tattoos. Bruises and memories. They all fade in time.” He used the back of his hand to wipe away a trickle of blood from his possibly broken nose. “Even blood. It will fade in time. Like I said, the humans in Yspaden, they didn’t give a fuck for the people in Blaviken either. They just wanted an outlet. They want to feel better about themselves. So they made a monster, like people always do. But they’ll lose interest eventually. Some other big bad will come along, or the old racism towards elves will flare up again, or the story will change so much in the telling that you’ll become unrecognizable. It’ll fade. And until it does, whenever you wake up and look at your hands you can just remind yourself that your favourite brother is an asshole who pulled some sick joke on you and that washing them won’t help. Only thing that’ll do that is time.”

Geralt sighed, and Lambert could tell his frustration was mostly with himself. “I know that. This isn’t my first year on the Path.”

“Yeah, well, I know my signs. Doesn’t stop Vesemir from riding my ass about practicing them every winter. A refresher never hurts.”

They drank in silence for another few minutes, neither of them particularly enjoying the ethanol, but both too insecure in the tentative peace to suggest going elsewhere for something more palatable to drink.

Finally, Geralt softly muttered, “I started a fight. I killed eight men. And one woman.”

“That’s it?” The look Geralt gave him indicated that that was the wrong reaction, so Lambert covered with another swig from the bottle and changed tack. “You said you started the fight, but what were they about to do? I don’t believe you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning and decided a little bloodshed was just the thing to shake off the blues.”

Geralt sighed. “You remember hearing about Tridam?”

The name did ring a bell. The strong alcohol was starting to make his thinking a little fuzzy around the edges, but he managed to pull something out of his partially pickled brain. “Hmm. That’s where those bandits captured a barge? Started killing off the hostages one by one until the baron let their friends out of prison?”

Geralt nodded. “The woman was in charge. Renfri. She told her men to kill the villagers in the marketplace, one by one. She wanted to force a mage, Stregobor, who had wronged her to come out of his tower.”

“Well that’s the stupidest fucking plan ever. I’ve never met a mage who wouldn’t let half a hundred people die just to save themselves the trouble of opening a window.”

“I know.”

“So how the fuck did ‘save a village from a psychotic band of murderers’ get turned into ‘Butcher of Blaviken?’”

Geralt flinched at the moniker. “They didn’t know what she was planning. The villagers, I mean. I- I didn’t let them start anything. I attacked first. Renfri she’d… she’d promised that nothing was going to happen. Everyone believed her. She had… she was easy to believe.” Geralt took another swig of the ethanol. “She attacked me when she saw what I’d done to her men.”

Clearly Geralt had also believed her, possibly right up until he’d had to put a sword through her throat. “Do you think she would have stopped? When she saw her brilliant plan wasn’t working? When she realized this Stregobor guy would never have come down? Would she have stopped?”

“No.”

“Then the way I see it, all you did was what you were created to do: end a monster.”

“She wasn’t,” Geralt insisted, pushing himself off the countertop as his body tensed, ready to fight. “It’s not that simple, Lambert. She had a reason for wanting revenge. She was born under the Black Sun and he ruined her life for it: turned her family against her and got her thrown out of her home. And then… well, you know how the world is. She was… she was just an innocent kid before he got to her.”

“So is everyone, to start off with. So were we, once.” Lambert intentionally did not rise to the challenge and kept his own body language loose and relaxed. It had the intended effect of winding Geralt up even further.

“I know, but damn it all, I should-”

“What? Have tried to help her kill the mage? Because you know that never would have happened. I mean I know these Black Sun chicks are supposed to be magic resistant, but how resistant was she to having the top of a tower just dropped on her head when Stregobor got sick of her posturing?”

“No, of course not. Still-”

“You should have helped the mage kill her before it got to the marketplace?”

“No! Fuck, Lambert!”

“Look, I know you don’t want to hear it, but sometimes there is no sleeping in the castle overnight to free the strygga or reburying the infant’s corpse to pacify the botchling or reciting poetry at the noonwraith until she moves peacefully on. Sometimes the innocent kid becomes the monster and there is no going back.”

“I know, damn it! But-” Geralt clenched his blackened fists. “But I hate it. There should have been a way. A way to stop it. There wasn’t, I know there wasn’t. But there should have been. I should have found it.”

“Yeah, you should have.” Geralt’s head whipped up to stare at Lambert incredulously. “What? If you wanted someone to say ‘No! You were right! You’ve never done anything wrong in your whole life, Geralt!’ you should have opened the door for Eskel. I mean me, I think you should have just left the whole group of idiots to themselves as soon as you realized there was no coin in it for you, but you? You are going to believe you should have found a way to save her for the rest of your unnatural life. You’re going to regret it every day from this moment on. You wanna talk about being inhuman? That. That right there. That kind of caring. In my experience, that’s inhuman.”

Geralt scoffed, but softly. If anything, his reproach seemed more for himself than Lambert. “Like trying to give someone a pep talk when they just punched you in the face and are the reason you got whipped bloody?”

Choosing to ignore that, Lambert put the bottle down and moved to stand unabashedly in front of his brother. “But Geralt, that regret? That feeling like you should have done something even though there was nothing to be done? That certainty that somehow if you'd just been better you could have saved her?” He wrapped his hands gently around Geralt’s still clenched fists and instinctively, in that tender touch, they unballed. His brother's eyes flicked up to meet his and for a second they reminded him so much of his mother's, open and unguarded in the moments when his father was out and they were alone, in the moments they were safe and could share soft comforts. “It never goes away, but trust me: it will fade.”

Geralt met his gaze for a long moment before sighing and gently pulling his hands free to fumble for the alcohol again. “How long?”

“Fuck, I don’t know. Depends on your stupid head. You seem like the type to dwell so I’d say-”

“The silver nitrate, jackass.”

“Oh. Two weeks. Give or take.”

“And what am I supposed to tell Vesemir and Eskel?”

Lambert grinned openly at the implication that Geralt’s self-imposed exile was ending. “About Blaviken? Whatever the fuck you want. About your hands, you can say I asked you to help me work on a new moon dust bomb recipe and it went horribly wrong. I assume, given your hands were still wet when you decked me, that I’m getting a lovely black splotch on my handsome mug as well which will help sell the story.”

“You?” Geralt actually smirked. “Lie to Vesemir?”

“I know, very out of character for me, but, hey, consider it a professional courtesy.” Lambert went to the barrel and dunked his own hands into the solution, pulling them back up as black as pitch, as black as Geralt’s. “One monster to another.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr ([octinary](https://octinary.tumblr.com/)) if you want to chat!


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